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If Agroecology is So Great, Why Aren’t All Farmers Doing It?

After a half century of pioneering work by farmers and scientists, agroecology has finally penetrated mainstream policy circles. This is due to agroecology’s widespread success on the ground and the tireless efforts of food activists and policy advocates determined to break corporate agriculture’s chokehold on the politics and the purse strings of our food system.

The two publications reflect a widespread push by civil society to advance agroecology as a solution to the rural poverty, hunger, erosion, agricultural pollution and greenhouse gas emissions attributed to industrial agriculture. Extensively referenced, the reports highlight agroecology’s many benefits, including comparable outputs to conventional systems, the production of nutrient-dense foods, resilience to climate change, the stabilization or increase of farmers’ incomes, and more.

What we’re left wondering is, if agroecology is so great, why aren’t more farmers doing it? What’s holding it back?

Friends of the Earth claims it is in large part the agricultural subsidies, expending “billions of dollars… for the ecologically destructive industrial production of commodity crops,” suggesting that doing away with subsidies would put an end to industrial production and usher in agroecological production.

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But farmers don’t grow environmentally destructive commodities simply because they receive subsidies. Farmers farm commodities because that is what the capitalist market dictates. They get hooked on subsidies because capitalist agriculture has an innate tendency to overproduce—thus dropping prices. Because they have high fixed and “up front” costs, when commodity prices drop, farmers increase their production to make ends meet. This only leads to greater consumption of chemical inputs, larger and larger (and fewer) farms, and of course, more overproduction. Subsidies don’t cause overproduction, they support the incomes of farmers who are caught in a system of capitalist overproduction and low prices.

The agrifood industry thrives on these low prices—especially processors and supermarkets that like to buy on the cheap. Seed, chemical and machinery companies like low prices too, because it drives farmers to produce more, ever buying newer and bigger technologies. The wealth of public subsidies eventually accumulates in these sectors—not with the farmers. Overall, this system keeps prices low for processors, supermarkets, and input companies – which is where money and power disproportionately resides.

But cutting off farm subsidies would be like cutting off SNAP benefits for low-income consumers to spite Walmart— ultimately hurting those struggling in a capitalist system without changing the market rules that keep the industrial agrifoods system in power.

The IPES report recognizes that “Industrial agriculture and the ‘industrial food systems’ that have developed around it are locked in place by a series of vicious cycles [that] allows value to accrue to a limited number of actors, reinforcing their economic and political power, and thus their ability to influence the governance of food systems.”

This is true, but IPES falls short of identifying capitalist agriculture and overproduction as the system locking industrial agriculture in and keeping agroecology out.

Both IPEs and FoE call for broad reforms—from shifting public support to agroecological agriculture, developing short supply chains and mainstreaming agroecology in research agendas, to developing new metrics and supporting broad based social movements for agroecology and local food. The IPES report concludes that, “Political incentives must be shifted in order for these alternatives to emerge beyond the margins. A series of modest steps can collectively shift the centre of gravity in food systems.”

Agroecology must indeed advance beyond the margins to become the norm rather than the alternative. The FoE’s and IPES’ recommendations are urgently needed. However, all of these recommendations fly directly in the face of capitalist agriculture, in which the tendency is towards massive and mechanized plantations, global supply chains, and the disappearance of the public sector entirely. Further, agroecology requires extensive human labor coupled with place-specific knowledges – bot of which are not compatible with the current system’s need for vast, cheap inputs.

So, when we discuss what’s holding agroecology back, we also need to discuss capitalism and how we can roll back the accumulation of money and power locking in the conventional industrial agricultural system.

We should celebrate the steady appearance of agroecology in policy debates as an important, essential—but insufficient—step in the urgent transformation of our food systems. The question is not just, “how can we scale up agroecology,” or “how can we use agroecology to change the food system,” but “how can agroecology help us transform capitalism itself?”